Brittle (High-Risk) Enterprise Applications
September 24, 2009
In the last few posts, I’ve been talking about “brittle” applications, applications that just don’t work unless everything goes right. We all know lots of analogues for these apps in other areas: the Ferrari that coughs and chokes if it’s not tuned once a week or the souffle that falls if you just look at it funny. But it doesn’t occur to most people that many, if not most enterprise applications fall into the same category.
They don’t realize, that is, that ordinary, run of the mill, plain-vanilla enterprise apps are kind of like Ferraris: it takes a lot to get them to do what they’re supposed to do.
Here are some examples.
Consider, for instance, the homely CRM application. Many, if not most executive users go to the trouble of buying and putting one in because they want the system to give them an actionable view of the pipeline. Valuable stuff, if you can get it. When the pipeline is down, you can lay people off or try new marketing campaigns. When it’s up, you can redeploy resources.
Unfortunately, though, it takes a lot to get a CRM system to do this. If, for instance, the pipeline data is inaccurate, it won’t be actionable. Say a mere 10% of the salesforce is so good or so recalcitrant that their pipeline data just can’t be trusted. You just won’t be able to use your system for that purpose.
It’s kind of funny, really. Giving you actionable pipeline data is a huge selling point for these CRM systems. But when was the last time you personally encountered one that was 90% accurate.
Another example I ran into recently was workforce scheduling in retail. A lot of retailers buy these things. But it’s clear from looking at them that the scheduling can be very easily blown.
Finally, take the example I talked about before, MRP. When you run that calculation, you have to get all the data right, or the MRP calculation can’t help you be responsive to demand. If even 30% of the lead times are off, you won’t be able to trust much of the run. And when was the last time more than 70% of the lead times were right.
Notice that if you underutilize a brittle system, it can be somewhat serviceable. If you use the CRM system to follow the performance of the salespeople who use it and don’t try to use the totals, the inaccuracy doesn’t matter. If you just use MRP to generate purchase requisitions, the lead times don’t matter. But, as I said in the earlier post, if you do underutilize the system, the amount of the benefit available falls precipitously. And then the whole business case that justified this purchase and all this effort just crumples.
What makes me think that a lot of enterprise applications are brittle? Well, I have a lot of practical, personal experience. But setting that to one side, it’s always seemed to me that the notion of brittle application explains a lot of data that is otherwise very puzzling.
Take for instance all the stuff that Michael Krigsman tells us about project failures. He is constantly reminding us that the cause of failure is a three-legged stool, that it could be the vendor or the consultant or the company, and he is surely right. What ought to be puzzling about this, though, is why there is no redundancy, why the efforts of one group can’t be redoubled to make up for failings in another. If the apps themselves are brittle, however, it takes all three groups working at full capacity to make the project work.
Or, more generally, look at the huge number of project failures (what’s the number, 40%, are abandoned?). Given how embarrassing and awful it is to throw away the kind of money that enterprise app projects take, you’d think that most people would declare some level of victory and go home, unless the benefit they actually got was so far from what they were hoping for that the whole effort became pointless.
How can you tell whether the enterprise app you’re looking at is brittle? Well, look at the failure rate. If companies in your industry historically report a lot of trouble getting these things to work, or if the “reference” installations that you look at have a hard time explaining how they’re getting the benefits that the salesman is promising you, it’s probably a brittle app.
Two questions remain. When do you want to bite the bullet and put in a brittle app? And why would vendors create apps that are intrinsically brittle?
Next post.
Brittle Applications
August 31, 2009
In a previous post, I said that MRP was a “brittle” application, and a commenter questioned me. What is a “brittle” application? Is this a technical term? What makes MRP brittle? All good questions.
A brittle application is one that doesn’t work at all unless a lot of disparate conditions are met. MRP, for instance, doesn’t work unless all the data is right, people know how to use the program, the demand for the products is stable, purchasing is also committed to minimizing inventory levels, etc., etc.
The notion applies to a lot of other programs besides MRP, though I’ve rarely heard the term used. But notice that it brittleness isn’t so much a feature of the program as it is the purpose to which the program is put.
Let’s take a simple example: a word processing program. For normal purposes, a word processing program in this day and age is not brittle. A rank novice can use it to type and print. But even today, if you want to use, say Microsoft Word, to put out a 16-page brochure, complete with illustrations, well, good luck, is all I can say. You try to get an illustration and have it float and change the size and put in a table, and–well, just try it, it’s a nightmare. So, to put a 16-page brochure together, Microsoft Word is brittle, but to print out a letter, it’s not.
The point about the MRP program that QAD wrote, which follows the APICS standard religiously, is that it’s brittle relative to the purposes for which it was intended. Pam and Karl and Evan (the founders of QAD) really believed that QAD’s could do supply chain management for manufacturing facilities very effectively. My point was that the program is too brittle. To get things right, you have to get all the data right and keep it right, etc., etc. And if you don’t, what you have is an overwrought and overcomplicated Kanban system, without Kanban’s virtues.
Are there other enterprise application systems that are brittle? Lots and lots of them, I think. Almost all the old, Siebel-style CRM systems were simply too brittle; they depended too much on the good-will of the salespeople, the accuracy of the sales model embedded in the system, the reliability of the sales cycle, etc., etc. You wouldn’t think that financial systems are brittle–after all, they have to work–but they often had components that were overly brittle: cash management systems, for instance, and fixed asset systems and budgeting systems.
What do most companies do when they have an overly brittle system? They use the system for lesser purposes. And they feel REALLY bad about it. So, the Microsoft Word user makes a brochure that is far less fancy, but more manageable, and the QAD MRP user uses the product for tracking inventory. And both of them keep on saying, “Well, one of these days, I’ll get around to really making this product sing.”
They shouldn’t. Brittle applications are brittle for a reason. A lot of the time, it’s because they’re really a special-purpose product, but yours is not that purpose. Some of the time, they’re brittle because they’re badly designed. Some of the time, the model they’re using (MRP is a good example) just doesn’t fit the situation you’re in. In any of the cases, the fact is that they really can sing for the right user, but that doesn’t mean it’s your fault if they don’t sing for you.
What do you do if you have a brittle app that isn’t singing? Give up on it. It won’t work for you. Get another app, one that works. Or change the process. Or just accept the fact that it will never work the way you thought it would.
In any case, good luck.
Think Small: Appropriate Technology for the Enterprise
June 24, 2009
Vinnie Mirchandani frequently rails against maintenance fees in his Deal Architect blog, quite correctly in my view. As apps get older, the ecosystem becomes more robust, the number of people available to make the things work increases, and the underlying technology gets better, prices should go down. That they don’t is a testimony to the chutzpah of the application vendors and the, er, timidity of the customers, nothing more.
But let’s say, Vinnie, that you know this and you’re not particularly craven, but you need these guys. What do you do? Or let’s say that you’re just buying something they’re offering, because it makes sense. What do you do? Or let’s say that you believe those silly pundits and you’ve decided to go off maintenance. What do you do?
As I said in an earlier post, you still need an application strategy. The question is really, “What should that strategy look like?”
In that earlier post, I suggested that you should favor cloud applications, because they reduce the invisible, but very real long-term infrastructure costs. You should think Google Apps and Salesforce and developing on Amazon (but not on Intuit’s QuickBase, no matter what you do).
But this isn’t in itself a strategy, it’s just a guideline. So let me add another such guideline.
Think small.
Do you remember back when Jerry Brown was governor of California and was talking about something he called, “Appropriate Technology.” Appropriate technology was small stuff, which worked, which didn’t cost too much, and which was suited to a small, local problem at hand.
Let me give you an example that I remember from the time. Our local, San Diego power company wanted to build a plant in the desert, basically to deal with peak power demand. This was a big technology solution. Perhaps emboldened by Governor Moonbeam, the appropriate technology people proposed a combination of cogeneration and peak usage pricing. Miracle of miracles, they one. Why? Well, I can assure you it wasn’t because San Diego County had gone blue. It was because everybody could see the point of not having to pay for concrete and transmission lines, when they didn’t have to.
Oh, gosh, am I talking about best-in-breed apps, heterogeneous computing environments, multiple vendors, nightmarish integration costs, etc., etc., all the things we were trying to get out from underneath when we jumped onto the big app bandwagon?
Yup, yup, yup. That’s what I’m saying. In this day and age, you’re better off figuring out small, local solutions to specific problems–and accepting the costs associated with that–than you are buying a large, global solution, that supposedly offers economies of scale, but never delivers them.
If you adopt this strategy, you think (or at least you entertain the possibility) that a small, light call center/knowledge management app that deflects 10% of the time-wasting calls and can go in tomorrow, SaaS, might do more for you than the global call-center app that is designed to automate your interaction with most of your customers, costs jillions, and will take so long to install that none of us will ever be there to see what happened–even though the large app is supplied by your primary IT supplier and will become part of your global application footprint (the one you pay all that maintenance for).
I know it’s a radical notion. But that’s the idea. Think small. Look for small improvements. Buy small apps to make the small improvements. Don’t buy more than you need; assume that light apps that do less are the way to go.
Given the cost structure in place today, you’ll not only do more, faster; you’ll save money.
Why? Well, when you cut through all the nonsense, it’s the same reason I pick up a wrench rather than call the plumber. It doesn’t require that much. The job gets done. And there’s no reason to pay any more than I have to.
The Applicator 